Commentary
ASEAN needs to determine how to balance perpetuating the benefits of technology cooperation with China while mitigating the risks of getting caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China gamesmanship.
Elina Noor
Research
AI Agents and Democratic Resilience
Autonomous AI agents are arriving at a moment of acute vulnerability for liberal democratic orders. Amid deep uncertainty about agents’ prospective capabilities and impacts, this essay considers how they might both accelerate and mitigate the structural pressures loosening democracy’s screws—and how to ensure the robust protection of democratic values in the age of agentic AI.
Published on Sep 4, 2025
Autonomous AI agents are arriving at a moment of acute vulnerability for liberal democratic orders. Amid deep uncertainty about agents’ prospective capabilities and impacts, this essay considers how they might both accelerate and mitigate the structural pressures loosening democracy’s screws—and how to ensure the robust protection of democratic values in the age of agentic AI.
AI agents fuse perception, memory, planning, and tool use. After some early stumbles, they may soon be able to perform almost any digital task humans can tackle, potentially at lightning speed and vast scale. We argue that this prospect would magnify every existing democratic fault line: accelerating white-collar displacement and feeding populist anger; ceding unprecedented leverage over the state to a handful of firms; giving would-be autocrats precision surveillance and other resources for “autocratic legalism”; and flooding the public sphere until real people flee a wasteland of mistrust.
Highly capable agents would also mint fresh hazards. Agentic AI companions can cultivate intimacy then weaponize it, scaling social manipulation. Coordinated swarms may prosecute cyber attacks that cripple democratic infrastructure. A perfectly obedient, AI-run bureaucracy would let leaders wear the state like an exoskeleton, sidestepping human checks and balances.
Agents could also advance democratic values. If democratic states adequately support open and decentralized access to frontier models, agents could serve as cognitive prosthetics guiding people through complexity, as shields detecting manipulation, and as advocates mobilizing collective power against corporate or governmental overreach. They can be part of the cure as well as the cause. But core democratic functions—agenda-setting, will-formation, definitive choice—cannot be outsourced without undermining what makes them worthwhile. Ultimately, even the best agent ecosystem will fail without urgent work to shore up the institutions and civic habits constitutive of democratic resilience.
The full paper is published on the Knight foundation website and can be found here.
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
More Work from Carnegie China
- ASEAN-China Digital Cooperation: Deeper but Clear-Eyed Engagement
- Biopharmaceuticals Rising: China’s Strategic Pivot to Southeast Asia Amid Great Power Tech CompetitionArticle
As tech competition moves into the biotech sector, China is increasingly shifting its focus to nearby regions to alleviate U.S.-induced supply chain pressures. As part of this transition, Southeast Asia has emerged as a favored destination.
Xue Gong
- Will Technology Differentiate China Today from Japan in the 1990s?Commentary
Ignoring the problems of its historical precedents won’t make China’s success any more likely.
Michael Pettis
- The Potential Chinese Responses to a U.S. Ban on TikTokCommentary
Beijing’s reaction to Washington’s proposed ban on TikTok could manifest in three distinct scenarios.
Xing Jiaying, Li Mingjiang
- The Many “One Chinas”: Multiple Approaches to Taiwan and ChinaArticle
Beijing says that over 180 countries accept its “one China principle” regarding Taiwan, but the reality is more complicated.
Chong Ja Ian
